


Monarchs

by elle_stone



Series: Summer 2020 Celebration [6]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Infidelity, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:27:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26796619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: “Wanheda,” Bellamy says, then, and she has to turn her gaze abruptly back to him. He’s holding out his hand and waiting.She takes a step forward and slides her palm into his.“Chancellor Blake,” she answers, but her voice sounds like another’s voice, too sly and too smooth with this role she’s playing. He’s staring at her without ease, seeing through her, gripping her hand so tightly that she understands why the expression around his eyes is blank, and his skin burns too warm against her skin.He slides his thumb softly across the side of her hand, then lets go.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: Summer 2020 Celebration [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1891306
Comments: 6
Kudos: 59





	Monarchs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marauders_groupie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marauders_groupie/gifts).



> For marauders-groupie on tumblr, who requested Bellarke + on the precipice of an affair.
> 
> This fic features background Clexa and Becho--neither one is prominently or positively depicted.

High above, forceful winds blow through the tops of the trees, but on the ground the night air is still and calm and Clarke is alone. She stands at the entrance to the arena, where tomorrow’s negotiations will take place, dwarfed by a ring of tall, imposing white columns, and stares out at a landscape of inscrutable stillness. She traces the path of the black granite scar across the earth. She listens for sounds: summer insects, scurrying animals, footsteps. Above these minute noises, sparks and flares of shouts rise up from the campsite behind her, overpowering the rest. No one wants to sleep on the night before a summit officially begins. All of the delegations have arrived by now, even Azgeda, even the Ark—all except the one that Clarke is waiting for.

Slight ghosts of them, like another sort of scar, trouble her.

A part of her thinks of them as her people, still. Some facets of her are too deeply ingrained, bits of identity, built out of nothing, that lodged in deep and rusted and corroded the whole. She’s not Arkadia, never was; not the Ark; not Alpha Station anymore; but she is the old dropship camp. She is the hundred. Obvious enough now, in the quiet, as she leans back against the cool and ghostly stone.

Out in the distance, out past the granite scar, where the trail winds subtly through the overgrowth, she sees it. There, a deeper shadow moving among the shadows, flashing long, round beams of light. She watches it approaching with a disturbing and uncanny calm. The Rover, twisting its way along the path to the campsite. The last delegation, riding up in the dead middle of the night. She’s thinking about Bellamy now without thinking about him, the specter of his presence like a subtle haunting, like the pain of phantom limbs. They haven’t seen each other in over a year. The last time, not long after the hundred seceded from Arkadia, he held himself stiff and apart from her, with the distance of a leader newly come into his own.

The space between them grows smaller and smaller. She pictures him behind the wheel, the Rover bumping over uneven ground, the splash of the headlights wobbling in the dark.

*

Clarke returns to the campsite in time to meet the delegation when they finally arrive. Above, thick gray-brown clouds hide the stars and obscure the last remaining sliver of the moon, and the ground itself is lit by violent flares of torches, set in two long rows between the tents. Here, in the middle of the congregation, the air has lost its clarity, has become thick with heat and curls of smoke. She stands by Lexa’s side, with her hands behind her back.

The Rover parks at the end of the left side row, in the cleared space left empty and waiting for it. Bellamy climbs down from the driver’s side, Raven from the front seat. Miller and Octavia jump out from the back doors, then slam them shut again with a decisive, metallic clang.

“Good evening, Commander,” Bellamy says, as he approaches, holding out his hand.

The corner of Lexa’s mouth curls up. It’s past midnight, now, but the clamor all around them has not ceased or even lessened since the afternoon: the clank of silver mugs chiming together, the rises and falls of conversations, scraps of songs and laughter and a tenuous hint of violence in arguments and threatened fights. The endlessness of all the hours before dawn.

“Good evening,” she echoes, gripping his hand with hers.

Clarke watches their hands meet and feels a tension between her shoulder blades. The feeling only sharpens when she glances at Raven’s face, then Octavia’s, Miller’s, lit as if by hell flame in the dark. Their expressions are unreadable. She discerns, at most, a wariness, a narrowness about the eyes. An inability to look at her.

“Wanheda,” Bellamy says, then, and she has to turn her gaze abruptly back to him. He’s holding out his hand and waiting.

She takes a step forward and slides her palm into his.

“Chancellor Blake,” she answers, but her voice sounds like another’s voice, too sly and too smooth with this role she’s playing. He’s staring at her without ease, seeing through her, gripping her hand so tightly that she understands why the expression around his eyes is blank, and his skin burns too warm against her skin.

He slides his thumb softly across the side of her hand, then lets go.

The endlessness of all the hours before dawn. She’s seventeen years old and his hand is resting at the small of her back, and he’s standing so close to her that she feels dizzy, there in the warm, small underground.

*

The next morning, she sees him outside the Azgeda tent, talking with Echo in low voices, head bowed so that his forehead almost touches hers. Her fingers curl around the edges of his jacket like she wants to pull him down.

“They’re going to cause trouble,” Lexa says. She might mean _Azgeda_ , or only _those two_ , and Clarke doesn’t know which is more accurate, which she should fear. She doesn’t answer, only looks at the Commander out of the corner of her eye. They fell asleep last night side by side, back to back, like warriors in battle. When her sleep was interrupted by cascades of fitful dreams, she listened to Lexa breathing and wondered if the sky had yet begun to pale, if outside, above them, the firmament had finally turned to grey.

Echo tugs Bellamy a step forward, and he balances himself with his hands at her waist.

The rest of the delegations have returned to their own tents now, settled into morning meetings among themselves as they prepare to leave for the arena. Camaraderie and old friendships, drinking games and jokes with whoever would listen, those were indulgences for the night past. The morning, with its streaks of bloody sunrise across the sky, is a time for retreat. For hardened loyalties. Only Bellamy has left his corner, and he’s not talking to her any longer, and she’s letting her palms rest against him as if with any force, she could push him away. Clarke cannot stop watching the way he kisses her.

“Territory realignments aren’t in Azgeda’s best interest,” she says, at last, and Lexa scoffs.

“But they could benefit your friends,” she says. “If they’re willing to listen to reason.”

“That’s an oversimplification,” Clarke answers. Pinpricks of nerves, or worse, a sickness, radiate out from the center of her, and she turns it all to diamond by crushing, crushing it down. “The hundred rely on their alliance.” She looks up, brushes the back of her hand against Lexa’s hand, and briefly intertwines their fingers. “Negotiating won’t be easy.”

“And yet,” Lexa smiles, the expression distant and cold, “you do it so well.”

*

The hundred speak little during the first round of discussions. Bellamy sits beneath the banner of the fourteenth clan, unsmiling, steady, and when Raven or Octavia seems about to interrupt, he raises his hand to warn her back, and that is all. He listens, and Clarke does not listen, because she’s thinking about the swipe of his thumb against her skin and about the last time he put out the fire at the dropship camp, and the quiet, sad way he looked at her when she told him he was _good_.

Distant from her, unseen, he’s become a ghost and a fantasy. Now only the arena itself separates them, dirty white stone that still shimmers in the sun.

At the midday break, she follows him, as he sneaks out behind the pillars and hides himself in the long shadows and deep shade. He presses himself back against the cool stone, and she revels in the way he startles at the sound of her voice.

“Are you just going to let Azgeda do all the talking?”

“Fuck.” He spits the word out and it sounds as if he were speaking her own name, now a curse on his lips. He squares his shoulders, but doesn’t pull away from the pillar, and the expression on his face settles again into that distant and unreadable mask. “Are you stalking me, Wanheda?”

“You know you don’t need to call me that.”

Here, protected from the strong, bright rays of the sun, she feels for the first time the warmth that has accumulated on her skin. She feels, as if it had widened, the gap between them. When she takes a step forward, he cringes back against the stone, and she catches sight of a tense tic at his jaw, the clenching of his teeth.

“Bellamy,” she adds, a new address or just an afterthought, she isn’t sure.

He sticks his hands in his pockets. “You didn’t come out here to talk to me about Azgeda, or clan boundary lines, or the negotiations, did you? Because you already know we’re not asking for anything. It’s not our fight.”

“You were talking about something this morning.”

“That was personal.”

Two steps would close the space between them. She can see now details of his face she could not make out in the firelight, details she’s forgotten in the months they’ve been apart: the shape of his mouth and the curve of his brow. Yet she has nothing to say. The longer he watches her, waiting, the more his expression softens. Now it looks like it’s crumbling, a ruinous expression he can no longer keep at bay.

“Personal like you and the Commander,” he adds, and Clarke has never been so bitter, so angry at the passage of time, for how sad he sounds when he says it.

He pushes himself off the pillar and starts to walk past her, but she steps in front of him at the last moment, so now they are chest to chest and her hands are resting on his chest. Shock, perhaps, keeps him still. Now at last she knows that he is solid and warm, and she can smell his sweat, and see the perspiration across his brow. Leadership, and loneliness, have hardened him. He looks like who the boy who owned the dropship camp, those early days, was trying desperately to be.

“Clarke,” he murmurs, raspy and low, and her name does not sound like an order, but like a plea. He reaches up and grabs her by the arms, squeezes tight but does not force her away. She curls her fingers in his shirt. They brace themselves against each other.

“You’re right,” she says, drops her gaze down from his eyes and to his lips. “I don’t want to talk about the summit.”

He closes his eyes, pained expression in the tremor of his eyelids and the parting of his lips, and she feels the last moment before he pushes past her, like the vision of a future as inevitable as breathing. “Then I guess,” he answers, “we really don’t have anything to say.”

*

Nothing but the past and this magnetic pull, the tension a pain in her muscles as they hold each other back. Every time that she glances at him, he’s watching her.

*

That evening, at dinner, he pulls her chair back for her, and as she sits down, he lets his fingertips skim the space between her shoulder blades. The touch seems more than a coincidence, less than a signal. And yet Lexa is sitting at the head of the table, in the highest seat. She sees everything, so what other communication is left to him?

After sunset, the camp becomes rowdy again. No one will sleep again tonight. Clarke finds Octavia drinking with Trikru, and Raven by the Floukru tent. Miller is with the Arkadian delegation; she sees him, early, sitting by the fire with Bryan, and almost trips over them later in the shadows, stretched out in the thick summer grass together, as she leaves the row of tents behind and wades out into the underbrush.

The night is warm again, and clear, and crickets and other insects buzz so loudly in the wilderness that she cannot hear her own thoughts, only the exhales of her own breath.

Bellamy is waiting for her out at the arena, in the same spot where, the night before, she waited for him. She knows that as soon as she steps onto the stone, he’ll hear her. He’s long used to searching out the smallest noises in the quiet, had a talent for it even back in their dropship days. When he took night shifts, standing guard at the gate, she felt safe letting herself sleep. So for a moment, she watches him from a distance, and thinks to ask herself for the first time, what she is daring to do. At dinner, she thought she felt a hesitation in his touch, like brewing guilt, and all through the afternoon, the burning embers of an old fire that will not die, there in his gaze.

None of this should be enough, but approaching him feels like coming home; she has that. She has this sense of calm that she cannot explain, when he turns and catches sight of her, and he lets his shoulders drop as with tension falling away. She has the unexpected look of tenderness that softens all of the sharp lines and angles of his face.

“I hope I didn’t startle you,” she says, so he can pretend to be surprised, if he wants to.

“You didn’t.” He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly as he turns to look out at the road again, the trees and grasses, the tragic granite scar through the green. She reaches out with both hands and takes his hand, and he flicks his gaze down and watches the gentle way she traces his knuckles with her thumb.

“You have so much more power than you think you do,” Clarke says, an awed whisper, and at that he roughly yanks his hand away.

“So that _is_ what all of this was about,” he snaps. “All of this—about some stupid territorial lines.”

Of course he would think so. Yet the accusation startles her. She’d been thinking about the power in his hands and the few times she’d been able to hold them; she’d been thinking about the hard crush of her body against his, when they met at Camp Jaha, and she could feel his nose pressed insistently into her hair. How every breath he’d taken was of her, and how she’d felt then, too, that she was home.

Beneath that, she’d thought about the village he’s been building out there on the edge of Arkadia’s land, a village she’s never seen but visits sometimes in her dreams. He took the title of Chancellor because the word meant power, meant leadership, meant control, when they were young and knew only one life and one set of rules. He could have called himself King, if he’d wanted to.

And here he comes to the summit and lets himself be subsumed, the ally of a greater power, quiet in the wings.

“That’s what you think of me?” Clarke asks, bitter solace in the uncertain way he looks at her. She takes acid-pleasure in the hint of sadness there, in the moment before it disappears.

“Then tell me,” he orders, “what I’m supposed to think.”

She wants to hold his hand between her hands again.

What is left now might be anger, a boneyard of words unsaid, grown green with moss and lichen in the long years since she left him. But she gave him only what he was fated to have all along: the sole leadership of their people in a new world. If he’s carrying those old hurts, he can tell her. She will not bring them up first, will not make this easy. She is consumed instead by the rest of the unfinished, what she always thought they would have, the two of them together, in the end. That beautiful, frightening feeling—every electric tremor of his touch.

“Think that you’ve always known me, better than you think you do,” she answers, and steps into his space again. When she reaches up to hold his face between her hands, he doesn’t pull away, or force her back. He just watches her, waiting, reading. And then he wraps his arms around her, and she’s gone.

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t know if it’s obvious but the ‘arena’ is the WWII Memorial and the ‘granite scar’ is the Vietnam Memorial, both in Washington D.C.


End file.
